A Better Way

Name: Jack

Web Site: http://www.thejacklawson.com

Bio: I'm a C# developer specializing in user interface engineering using jQuery, with a ferocity for learning. When I was 11, I was determined to make Tomb Raider 3 and saved up all of my allowance money for "Learn to Program BASIC". I didn't make it in the game industry, but I did find myself drawn to web development. By the time I was 16, I achieved my goal and began working at Xponex Media as an ASP developer. Throughout my career, I moved to ColdFusion, PHP, and finally ASP.NET with C#. All along the way, I've picked up new skills and techniques, and over the last two years I've found my niche- user interface engineering. I've always had a bit of a knack for design, and being torn between design and development found me knee-deep in CSS and Javascript. It's a place where I can still impact the overall architecture and write C#, but where I can let my inner designer run free.

Posts by Jack:

ASP.NET 4.0 Changes tl;dr

June 25th, 2010

ASP.NET 4.0 Updates – http://www.asp.net/learn/whitepapers/aspnet4

tl;dr:

• Stuff moved from web.config to machine.config
• More robust XSS checking and form post validation
• More streamlined inclusion of Microsoft AJAX framework (UpdatePanels), and jQuery (which Microsoft officially includes now)
• More control over viewstate
• Built-in page routing for webforms (how MVC urls work, but now works with webforms. www.mem.com/contentdisplay/5123431 for example)
• Setting client IDs on controls instead of ASP.NET building it for you
• New Chart control
• Project templates slimmed down
• Better CSS styling on controls, option to not render tables around some controls (formview, login, stuff like that)
• ASP.NET MVC2
• Intellisense improvements

Tl;dr: tl;dr: Lots of little updates that will make asp.net better.

C# 4.0 Updates – http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=cs2010samples&DownloadId=10177

tl;dr:

• Dynamic binding; create objects and use methods and properties that may not exist yet on a “dynamic” typed object. This gets resolved at runtime. Upside: use non-type-safe languages and crazy voodoo magic where you don’t know the type. Downside: you only catch bugs at runtime. Use sparingly, but for awesome things. “dynamic” objects can literally do anything, as long as whatever it ends up as supports it. No lambdas on dynamic.
  • Tl;dr: magic, type safety is so 2009
  • Named and optional arguments; you don’t have to enter in your parameters in order, or even enter in all of them.
  • “string”- that’s lower-case, kids- is an object now.

Tl;dr: tl;dr: Dynamic programming is the key word. Also VB updates, but if a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s around to hear it, does anyone care?

ASP.NET 4.0 Breaking Changes – http://www.asp.net/learn/whitepapers/aspnet4/breaking-changes

tl;dr:

• A bunch of stuff you can do to revert changes, so I dunno why they’re in the “Breaking changes list”. Read for details, sorry.
• Stronger .aspx parsing, controls with random characters breaking stuff will break stuff. Our code should be clean, but needs to be looked at anyway.
• Stronger request validation, so errors may occur on posts that didn’t previously. To revert, we can add a line in the web.config if it gets crazy. Definitely check pages with rich text controls.
• Update your projects through visual studio to .net 4.0 so your web config doesn’t get borked. They support it, but it’ll make life easier.
• A bunch of troubleshooting options

tl;dr: tl;dr: More stuff, almost definitely won’t break existing code we have. Double-check pages submitting HTML (rich text areas.)

tl;dr: Better standards, MVC 2, Dynamic typing, stronger parsing and validation




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HTML5 Site – Waterford Family Bowl (Part 3 of n)

May 4th, 2010



Image via Wikipedia

(Back to beginning of series)

Part 3: Site Architecture Design

Now that I had the majority of the HTML and CSS down, I had more to figure out about how to implement the various features (like image gallery, news,and mailing list). Should I write my own, or should I use existing tools? What language should I use? What database system? Which pages should be static, which dynamic? The process of building he site was all about efficiency: getting the most done, using the best tools, in the least amount of time. That would allow me to focus as much time as possible in my before my deadline towards the things that will make a difference: site design, usability, and the the use of the features on the site.

I came with the conclusion that I could, and should, develop most of the data management using external tools. Spending time re-inventing the wheel and rebuilding tools that already have dedicated teams would be wasteful, especially when they all had some sort of hook (mostly RSS feeds) that I could just pull into the site. I was familiar with all the 3rd party tools I needed, so I was already comfortable with using them and knew they had the features that I needed. I came up with:

• Google Apps for email and calendar
  • Here’s a good tutorial. It was a little messy at first, but it gives you an iframe (the only standards-breaking thing on the site… thanks, Goog) that you can just drop in.
• Picasa for photo gallery
  • I chose Picasa for a few reasons, the largest of which was the integration of the Google Apps account. While there’s no “Picasa” section of Google Apps, I could use the account I set up to minimize the logins I’m using, now that I’m using four tools. I used the RSS feed to export to the image gallery and to make an image gallery  RSS link on the home page.
• WordPress for dynamic pages and news
  • The reason I used WordPress, and I didn’t just slap together my own editor, was the WCM Page Feeder plugin. It allows you to serve individual WordPress pages as an RSS feed. This means that I could use WP’s superior news-serving tools along with their page editing tools with very simple integration. I also added an RSS link to the home page, for news.
• Pommo for mailing list management
  • I tried out a few tools, and found this to be the easiest to set up. Makes adding an email form pretty simple, manages everything for me. Another several hours saved to these guys. Here’s some credit

I also used a couple 3rd party PHP Libraries so that I could hook all of this lovliness together:

• Simplepie RSS Reader
  • Note: I had to switch my WordPress RSS feeds over to Atom, even though SP claims it can read the RSS 2.0 standard. This was a simple checkbox in the “Writing” section of the WordPress settings.
• phpmailer for mail functions
  • A little messy to set up to go through Google Apps mail. I had to set these settings in class.phpmailer.php in order to connect without errors. Once you have this part right, though, you’re good to go. I’ll go into more detail about this in the next article.

Once all of these tools were in place, it was a simple matter of dumping their content, using Simplepie, into my template. I’ll talk about the actual hooking up of everything, and setting up the custom code I did write, in the next article.





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HTML5 Site – WFB Site UI Design / HTML Structure (Part 2 of n)

April 29th, 2010

(Back to beginning of series)

Part 2: Site UI Design / HTML Structure

When I first picked up the project, I had a few things to consider: what requirements do I have, and once I had those, how would I display these feature in a neat manner, and what technologies would I use to implement them. The requirements part came out pretty easily, after a couple of phone conversations:

• Calendar of events
• Photo Gallery
• News section
• A few generic pages
• Email mailing list
• Misc. vital information (times open, address, that sort of thing)

And now I needed to put together some kind of design. I had recently finished reading a few usability books, so I was feeling pretty good about putting some of these ideas to work. I knew that people coming to the website were probably going for directions, a phone number, or hours of operation, so I put high priority on these being visible and easy to use (such as a Google Maps link for the address). I also wanted to entice people to explore other areas, so I added some photos from the photo gallery towards the top of the page. Finally, I included elements from all the page- just little teasers- across the front page, such as a small calendar of events, news block, and a blurb and picture about their restaurant. Now, I had a home page with all the information a user needs, quickly and at the top, while encouraging visitors to browse a little and check out the gallery and other pages for even more information.

With this sketched out on paper, it was time to actually write out the HTML. I came up with a structure similar to my HTML5 Template (and in fact, it’s what I based my template off of.) I wanted to use the new semantic HTML5 elements and attributes, such as example text on textboxes:

<input type="text" name="Email" id="email" maxlength="60" placeholder="email@youraddress.com" />

I used the help of a jQuery Watermark plugin to help style the textboxes as well, since few browsers actually pay attention to the placeholder attribute yet. Further HTML5 inclusions were sections for the individual blocks of text, an aside for the side column, header, footer, and nav elements. Besides the HTML5, I also implemented a link tag for the news RSS feed:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://www.waterfordfamilybowl.com/wordpress/index.php/feed/" />

This allows browsers and whatever happens to crawl your site to say “hey, there’s an RSS feed here” and allow users to easily pick up the news RSS feed. You’ll notice it in FireFox, IE, and Chrome if you have an extension installed.





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My HTML5 Template

April 20th, 2010

I’ve noticed that whenever I make a site, 99% of the time I copy at least 50% of the markup from another site I’ve done before instead of re-writing the structure. It saves a lot of time, and it makes styling easy- I’m re-styling the same site as I’ve already done, maybe with different colors and images. So, what I’ve done is make a generic template that acts as a site-starter. It’s pretty full, so it may not be to everyone’s tastes, but it covers most scenarios I’ve run into.

Here’s what I use. Feel free to copy it and do whatever you want, it’s GPL v2 licensed. (zip file)

• The Html5 Shiv (conditionally for IE, of course.)
• The CSS is Richard Clark’s HTML5 Reset Stylesheet, plus some stub styles like image / text replacement for the h1.
• Whatever jQuery UI 1.8 theme (if applicable.. most of my sites use jQuery UI, so I added it to my template.)
• Conditionally, an IE stylesheet. I go ahead and lump IE 6+ into one bucket. This could be broken out into several stylesheets (per IE version), but I’ve found that using the reset sheet generally limits the amount of IE fixes I have to do, so there’s not much wasted download time at all for IE users. If your stylesheet gets too heavy, break it out at your discretion.
• Several IE conditional statements to build IE wrapper divs to make styling easier. If you’re including styles by version, you probably don’t need this. Also has the added benefit of fast browser version checks with jQuery.
• Header with heading, subheading. The h1 is a link sometimes, using css image/text replacement. I went back and forth on whether the page title or the site title should be an h1- and chose an h1 based on arguments on this blog post.
• Seperate nav. I almost put it with header- but I like keeping the header more pure for the logo/title and subheading.
• A div to wrap all of the content, and then a “maincontent” div. I haven’t found better names yet, so here you go. They’re not section elements, like most of the content is in- the structure is there strictly for styling reasons.
• An example section. I like giving it an id with the page title, so I can add in page-specific styles as needed.
  • The section’s header, and content, as is reccomended
• An aside, styled as a right-hand column with subsections
• A footer, with links (probably the same as the main links), and copyright information. I’ve used an address element to wrap the webmaster’s email. Semantics!
• Finally, jQuery 1.4.2 and jQuery UI 1.8 pulled from offsite sources (parallelize downloads, plus it’s likely cached from another site)

So, the idea was to get about an hour or two’s work done by simply opening up a file. I think I’ve accomplished this- anything extra I can remove, I can switch the left and right columns pretty easily (or add a third, or fourth), and I have some very basic styles down (just change those grays to something a little more colorful.) Be free, my template!





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HTML5 Site – Waterford Family Bowl (Part 1 of n)

April 3rd, 2010


Waterford Family Bowl website (www.waterfordfamilybowl.com)

A little while ago, my aunt approached me- she needed a website for her bowling alley. “Sure,” I said. “Let’s go over what you want and we’ll build something that works for you.”  In the back of my mind, I was thinking “awesome! Perfect timing to flex my HTML5 muscles and try jQuery 1.4 in a production environment; will it work?”

The site’s now completed, and in production. Go ahead and check it out at http://www.waterfordfamilybowl.com (still waiting on a little alternate content ). I’m going to, over a series of 4 or 5 posts, go over how the site works- how and why I used PHP, jQuery, HTML 5, jQuery, WordPress, Picasa, Google Analytics and Webmaster tools, and Google Apps; and, how I merged them all to create a dynamic, easy to use and easy to edit website. I used principles from books like “The Design of Everyday Things” and “Don’t Make Me Think”, and I’ll explain how and where these came into play.   The process I took made even IE 6 compatibility a breeze!

Brief overview on how I plan to break it down:

1. Intro to series
2. Design - architecturally and graphically
3. Implementation of WordPress, Picasa, etc.
4. “Contact Us”, finishing touches
5. Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools overviews
6. Wrap-up (maybe?)





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